September 25 in History

James Madison had promised, and now he had to deliver. On September 25, 1789, the first Congress approved twelve proposed amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten would survive the process, becoming the Bill of Rights and permanently defining the boundaries between government power and individual liberty in the United States. The amendments were the price of ratification. During the fierce debates over the Constitution in 1787 and 1788, Anti-Federalists like George Mason and Patrick Henry had argued that the document's lack of explicit protections for individual rights made it a blueprint for tyranny. Several state conventions ratified only after receiving assurances that a bill of rights would be added. Madison, who initially considered such a list unnecessary, recognized that failure to follow through would threaten the new government's legitimacy. Working from over 200 proposals submitted by the state ratifying conventions, Madison distilled the list to seventeen amendments, which the House reduced to twelve. The Senate consolidated them further. The final twelve articles addressed everything from congressional pay and apportionment to freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to bear arms; protections against unreasonable search and seizure; and the guarantee of due process. The first two proposed amendments, dealing with congressional representation and compensation, failed to win immediate ratification. The compensation amendment eventually became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992, 203 years after it was proposed. Articles three through twelve were ratified by the required three-fourths of state legislatures by December 15, 1791, becoming the First through Tenth Amendments. The Bill of Rights initially applied only to the federal government, not the states. Most protections were not extended to state and local governments until the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause was interpreted to "incorporate" them, a process that unfolded gradually through Supreme Court decisions from the 1890s through the 1960s. Madison's reluctant compromise became the most celebrated feature of American constitutional law.

Leonardo Torres Quevedo demonstrated his invention, the Telekino, before King Alfonso XIII and a large crowd in the port of Bilbao on September 25, 1906, guiding a boat through the harbor by remote radio control from the shore. The demonstration is widely considered the birth of remote control technology. Torres Quevedo, a Spanish civil engineer and mathematician who had already designed an innovative system of aerial tramways, had been developing the Telekino since 1903. The device used a telegraph transmitter to send coded radio signals to a receiver aboard the boat, which translated those signals into commands for the vessel's rudder and propulsion system. The system worked reliably across a distance of several hundred meters, and the successful public demonstration proved that machines could be operated without any physical connection between the operator and the device. Torres Quevedo patented the Telekino in France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States, envisioning military applications including remotely guided torpedoes. The military potential was not lost on observers, and several European navies investigated radio-controlled weapons in the years that followed. Beyond military applications, the principle Torres Quevedo demonstrated in Bilbao became the foundation for every remote-operated device that followed: television remotes, garage door openers, drone aircraft, Mars rovers, and robotic surgery systems all trace their conceptual lineage to a Spanish engineer steering a boat across a Basque harbor while a king watched from the dock.

Nine Black teenagers walked through the front doors of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 25, 1957, escorted by paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division with fixed bayonets. The students had been blocked, threatened, and mobbed for three weeks. Now the United States Army stood between them and the white segregationists who had vowed they would never attend. The Little Rock Nine, as they became known, were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls. They had been selected from a larger pool of volunteers by NAACP leader Daisy Bates based on their academic records and their ability to endure harassment. Nothing could have fully prepared them for what they faced. Inside the school, the soldiers could not be everywhere. White students spat on them, tripped them in hallways, poured hot soup on them in the cafeteria, and shoved them down stairs. Minnijean Brown was suspended and eventually expelled after retaliating against her tormentors by dumping a bowl of chili on a boy who had been harassing her. Segregationist students wore buttons reading "One Down, Eight to Go." Ernest Green became the first Black student to graduate from Central High in May 1958, with Martin Luther King Jr. in attendance. Governor Faubus responded by closing all of Little Rock's public high schools for the entire 1958-1959 school year rather than continue desegregation, a move known as the "Lost Year" that disrupted the education of over 3,000 students of both races. The courage of the Little Rock Nine transformed the national debate over civil rights. Their ordeal, broadcast on television and printed in newspapers around the world, exposed the violence underlying segregation to an audience that could no longer look away. Each of the nine went on to distinguished careers in government, journalism, finance, and education. In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded all nine the Congressional Gold Medal.

John Bonham left behind a drumming legacy that redefined rock percussion, from the thunderous opening of "When the Levee Breaks" to the explosive power of "Moby Dick." Born in Redditch, Worcestershire, in 1948, he began playing drums at age five on coffee tins and pots before receiving his first snare drum at ten and a full kit at fifteen. He played in local bands around Birmingham and developed a reputation for volume that got him fired from several groups whose equipment could not keep up with his power. Jimmy Page recruited him for Led Zeppelin in 1968 on the recommendation of Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, both of whom had played with Bonham in Birmingham bands. His playing on Led Zeppelin's debut album was revolutionary: he brought the intensity of a jazz drummer to rock music, using a Ludwig kit with oversized drums and hitting harder than anyone had previously attempted in a recording studio. His signature bass drum pattern on "Good Times Bad Times," recorded when he was twenty, announced a new standard for rock drumming. "When the Levee Breaks," recorded in the stairwell of Headley Grange with distant microphones, produced a drum sound that has been sampled hundreds of times and remains one of the most recognizable recordings in popular music. His death from alcohol-related asphyxiation on September 25, 1980, at age thirty-two, ended Led Zeppelin immediately. The remaining members issued a statement declaring that the band could not continue without him. The decision was instant and unanimous. No replacement was considered. The tribute was simple: Led Zeppelin without Bonham was not Led Zeppelin.

America's first newspaper lasted exactly one issue. On September 25, 1690, printer Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick in Boston, a four-page broadsheet that the colonial government immediately suppressed. The paper's entire print run was confiscated and destroyed, but its brief existence established a principle that authorities would spend the next century trying to contain. Harris was an experienced troublemaker. He had published a radical anti-Catholic newspaper in London called Domestick Intelligence before fleeing to Boston in 1686 to escape prosecution. Publick Occurrences was intended as a monthly publication, and Harris left the fourth page blank so subscribers could add their own news before passing it along. The content was a mix of war reporting, local news, and gossip. Harris covered King William's War against the French and their Native American allies, reported on a suicide in Watertown, described a smallpox outbreak, and included an item alleging that the king of France had an affair with his daughter-in-law. The colonial authorities were less concerned with the scandalous content than with the fact that Harris had published without a license. Four days after publication, the Governor and Council of Massachusetts Bay Colony banned the paper, declaring that it had been printed "without the least Privity or Countenance of Authority" and contained "Reflections of a very high nature." Every available copy was ordered destroyed. Harris never published another issue. The suppression of Publick Occurrences reflected a governing class that viewed printing as a privilege to be controlled, not a right to be exercised. Licensed newspapers would not appear in America until 1704, when John Campbell began publishing the Boston News-Letter with the government's explicit permission. The tension between press freedom and government control that Publick Occurrences exposed would define American journalism for the next three centuries, from the Zenger trial of 1735 through the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791.